McCain Runs Against Bush

He’s getting more candid about it by the day – and it’s frustrating not to see this covered more in the U.S. media. McCain wants to put torture behind us, and to reach out again to allies. Money quote from the Sunday Telegraph:

In a sign that he wants to distance himself from the president – to whom he lost in an ugly campaign in 2000 – Sen McCain outlined a series of measures to roll back Bush policies and counter the "ugly American" image.

"I would immediately close Guantanamo Bay, move all the prisoners to Fort Leavenworth (an army base in Kansas) and truly expedite the judicial proceedings in their cases," he said. "I would reaffirm my commitment to address the issue of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. I know how important this is in Europe in particular."

A future McCain-Cameron alliance across the Atlantic is an appealing one.

From Faith To Music

Reflectnicholasklammafpgetty

A reader writes:

Your latest essay back to Sam Harris coincided with the arrival here at home of a CD of Anton Bruckner‘s 2nd symphony, conducted by the late Carlo Maria Giulini, performed by the musicians of the Weiner Symphoniker. Among classical music fans, the Guilini/Weiner version of the 2nd is something of a gem. Bruckner (1824-1896) is often noted for being a devout Catholic from a small town in Austria, and both items show through in his music. He dedicated his last, unfinished, still magnificent symphony No. 9, "to my beloved God."

I write about this because your dialogue with Sam and several of the more astute and moving reader responses have made it clearer to me than ever that my deep love for a good deal of classical music, and of Bruckner’s music in particular, shows where much of my Catholicism "went": it sort of sublimated from its solid, early forms of devotion and practice as a child and adolescent (in a large, extended Irish-French Catholic family) — to a transcendental, aurally carried experience and communion; religious practice sublimated into musical meditational forms. Listening, playing, brings the same awe that you’ve written about and hinted at visually in the several pictures that have accompanied your essays on faith and the unfathomable.

Richard Osborne believes that Giulini and Bruckner’s shared Catholicism is a big part of their unusually strong concert:

"Giulini is a believer, a committed Catholic. Those who have worked with him have rarely been in doubt that here is a man, in tenor Robert Tear’s memorable phrase, under ‘the clout of God.’ Walter Legge … talked of Giulini being surrounded by "a radiant nimbus." He also referred to him as Saint Sebastian, the suffering one. Tear saw this quality at first hand: ‘Sometimes you felt music-making was something of a hair-shirt to him. The music was too beautiful to endure because what was coming through was getting closer to this vision of "the cymbol clash" with God as Elgar once put it. And the closer Giulini got to this the more painful the experience became.’"

Music is not a hair shirt for me: I’m too much the Irishman for whom it is a sentimentalist’s airy feast. Between Bruckner and Giulini we have the prophet of the divine aural spark, and a great priest of a conductor to lead the enactment of the sacrament.

I do like it that most of this music is wordless; it keeps the theologians at bay.

My own taste in music is also, I realize, skewed toward believers. Tallis, Byrd, Messiaen and Tavener all speak to me as musical vessels of the divine. But unlike my reader, I don’t see music as an alternative to faith – but as one sublime expression of it. If only the hierarchy of the church were able to channel these immense cultural resources toward a reinvigorated and thoroughly modern Catholicism. But they seem more concerned with enforcing sexual strictures.

(Photo: the interior of Washington’s national cathedral by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty.)

Impunity, Immunity

One reason I love my readers is that they take the time to tell me the following:

In two instances on Saturday you used an amusing eggcorn, "legal impunity", when you should have written "legal immunity". I googled the your version of the term and found only 12,500 references (one of which is from a November, 2006 entry on your own blog), whereas there are 114,000 results for the correct usage, including this wikipedia entry, which should help clarify your understanding.

Of course, I’m immune to pedantry. But you still punish me. While we’re on the subject, I should have written transgender woman, rather than transgendered, apparently.

There Are Many Iraqs

I recommend reading the actual report on which my paper, the Sunday Times, based its story on Iraqis feeling more confident about the future. The sectarian differences in perspective are much more striking than headlines about "Iraqis". From the press release:

Despite the horrendous personal security problems only 26 percent of the country preferred life under the previous regime of Saddam Hussein, with 49 percent preferring life under the current political regime of Noori al-Maliki. As one may expect, it is the Sunnis who are most likely to back the previous regime (51 percent) with the Shias (66 percent) preferring the current administration.

Carried out amongst a nationally representative sample of 5,019 Iraqi adults aged 18yrs+ and coming just days before the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the poll reveals that despite the rising number of civilian deaths each month as a result of militia activity, only 27% would concede that their country is actually in a state of civil war. Opinion here is clearly divided, as 22% feel “we are close to a state of civil war but not yet in one” while 18% argue that the country is “still some way from civil war”.

So, in fact, almost half of Iraqis currently say that their country is either in or close to a state of civil war. The numbers are very different in the Shia-dominated South from the more Sunni north:

Regionally, 43% of those in the Shia dominated South of the country claim ‘Iraq will never get as far as civil war’. This figure in the Sunni dominated north plummets to 5 percent where most (42 percent) feel the country is already in a state of civil war.

It’s worth downloading and reading the whole PDF file. What I learn from it is that Saddam truly was a hideous monster, but that Iraq is still a terribly divided country that still wants to remain a single country. That means soft partition may be hard; and it means civil war could be long and intense and also regional. Much of the action will not take place in the South but in the north and Baghdad. We could be fighting this for a very, very long time if we decide to stay enmeshed.

Two contrary blogposts discussing the story can be read here (pro-surge) and here (anti-surge).

In The Spirit of Orwell

Could we please stop calling "private military contractors" anything but mercenaries? I know some aren’t in combat (although many more are). But they are military forces and support in the private sector working in a war-zone for one side (or other) for pay. They’re mercenaries. And what they have been up to in Iraq is one of the great under-covered stories of the war. I have a feeling that the public will one day be shocked at what has been going on in front of our noses.